Diyarbakır, Hasankeyf & Mardin

I'm very glad I decided to spend some time in Diyarbakır. It turned out to be a very picturesque town and was the first place in Turkey that felt more like being in Asia than Europe. I kind of wish I'd stayed another day but did manage to see a good chunk of the town in the afternoon I had there. Interesting factoid: The ancient Diyarbakir city wall is 6 km in length which supposedly makes it the second longest wall in the world after the (considerably longer) Great Wall of China



Yesterday I came a couple hours further east to the amazing little town of Hasankeyf perched on the banks of the Tigris river.



Finally, here are a few photos from Mardin. The Lonely Planet raves about this town so I took a day trip to see it today. Not sure it was actually worth 5 hours round-trip on the bus to get there but it gave me an excuse to stick around Hasankeyf for another night.



Tomorrow I'm going to head to Van in far eastern Turkey. I think I can catch a bus from the nearbye town of Batman (!) otherwise I'll have to backtrack back to Diyarbakır which I will make an already long day even worse.